So There’s This New Vampire Weekend Song We Can’t Get Out of Our Head

On Friday, the Internet gave us a clip of Vampire Weekend playing a new song, their first since 2010’s Contra, at a show in Cleveland. It was instantly likable, as most Vampire Weekend songs are, its acoustic melody skidding along happily. We heard it again while watching the Pitchfork Festival webcast of their headlining set last night. Now we’re hooked. It’s much less fussy than we’ve come to expect from the polo club crew, lyrics like “You know I love you/And you love the sea” skewing more towards singer-songwriter than anything they’ve done in the past. There are still tricky guitar runs and keyboard trembles, but it’s a little more Simon & Garfunkel (à la “Cecilia”) than just Simon. There are also handclaps, worth noting.

You can watch Pitchfork’s entire webcast, divided neatly into each of the three days, right here. For our purposes, Vampire Weekend’s set begins around the 7:40:00 mark in the video above, with the new song starting at 8:19:00. At 8:52:35, Ezra says, “After this show we’re gonna go back home and finish our next album,” before delving into the near-perfect “Walcott” to hold us over.